Valkyrie's Song Read online

He’d thought them idiots when he’d first encountered them but now life seemed such a fleeting thing for mortals that to try to delay its ending by ten or twenty years seemed to be missing the point. The years were an invading army, sweeping all before them. Dying at one moment was very much like dying at another. Unless you didn’t die. Unless you saw the invader take everything but leave you standing in the dead dust of love.

  Gylfa irritated him. He sat clinking the coins he’d taken from the Normans as if fascinated by them. Loys forgave him. He had never known true poverty – his parents had earned a good living and he’d gone into the monastery as a boy. The kid had been raised on tales of plunder, no doubt, but never thought to see any.

  ‘How did you come on the boat?’

  ‘My father took me. He said it would be good for me.’

  ‘You could have finished with a good farm in England.’

  ‘Yes. I fought, you know. I had to. The English army came on us so quick.’

  Their fire was a small one – the wood had been hard to come by. Loys stretched out his hands to it. Without the stone he rarely felt cold.

  ‘May I ask,’ said Gylfa. He was stumbling for words, clearly afraid of Loys.

  ‘Ask what you want.’

  ‘May I ask. Are you a devil? You are bound to answer me if I ask, so says my priest.’

  ‘I am only bound to answer if I am a devil. And then you would need to confine and bind me with holy symbols and the name of God.’

  ‘You know about such things.’

  ‘I was a scholar.’

  Glyfa scratched at the dirt with his foot. ‘Are you a devil?’

  ‘What makes you think I am?’

  Gylfa crossed himself. ‘You run all day without tiring. You kill many men yet you don’t look like a warrior. Your hand, which when I met you was swelled up like a pig’s bladder, is now whole and mended.’

  Loys held up his hand to examine it. It still seemed miraculous to him that he could heal so quickly.

  ‘I am a man. But the priests would say I am possessed by a devil.’

  ‘What would you say?’

  ‘I think it likely. But it is not as I imagined it when I read of possession in my studies. This devil can be faced down.’

  ‘By prayer?’

  Loys did not like to think about this. He had not considered the state of his immortal soul for years. He would rid himself of the demon the best way that he knew – by dying. That was not suicide. He had no intention of killing himself, because that was a sin. The girl would do that for him. But his very existence challenged everything taught by the holy church. He had tried for years to make it fit but it did not. In all obedience he could accept the teachings of Rome but his scholar’s nature made him attach weight to what he saw with his own eyes, felt in his own heart.

  The Bible contained no mention of the fiend that had set its eye on him.

  ‘Prayer will not do. This devil needs to be faced on its own terms.’ He tapped the stone.

  ‘The priest says that is a graven image and the work of idolaters.’

  ‘He has seen my stone?’

  ‘Items like it. Trinkets, the horns of animals, the hammer of Thor.’

  ‘Are you guided by the church, Gylfa?’

  ‘I try to be.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Loys. ‘I don’t want to be this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What I am.’

  ‘I would love to kill ten men, to run like a horse.’

  ‘I killed four,’ said Loys.

  ‘But you have killed before?’

  Loys threw some more twigs on to the fire.

  ‘You will burn in hell for that and for treating with dark powers.’

  ‘I don’t treat with them. They treat with me.’

  Loys felt guilty for telling this young man his secrets. He had hidden his true nature for so long simply to avoid the attention of men. An emperor who knew he had near him a man who had lived for a hundred and twenty years might wish to question that man, might regard him as dangerous, even imprison him. Loys was a formidable warrior but even he couldn’t stand against ten men – not the disciplined Varangians of the emperor’s guard anyway – and, even if he could, he didn’t want the fuss. He had been open with Gylfa for one reason: he thought it wasn’t going to matter because the young man was going to die.

  Gylfa offered Loys some of the bread he had taken from the Normans. Loys held up his hand.

  ‘You have it,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t need food either?’

  ‘I don’t need it yet and neither do you. I do want it. That’s different.’

  ‘How different?’

  ‘You can ignore what you want. You can’t ignore what you need. That would seem to me to be an essential difference between the two words.’

  ‘You talk strange,’ said Gylfa.

  Loys had forgotten, for a second, that he was talking to a northern farm boy, not a scholar of the Magnaura in Constantinople.

  He did feel hungry but he thought the boy needed to eat more than he did. Hunger, like pain, passed.

  Once he had thought that feeding his human appetite might quell that of the wolf. But it didn’t work like that, he’d found. The wolf ’s hungers were deep fires and could not be fed by meagre fuel.

  They lay down to sleep, pressed up against each other. Loys had travelled before and had had to share too-small beds with strangers but there was something about this forced proximity to another human that rankled him. He felt close to death, or close to a chance of death. The boy was almost certainly going to die in such a hostile place. He would have liked a better companion than a farting, angle-some boy he had tried to save in a gesture of sentimental futility. He thought of Beatrice. He could hardly remember her face now. She was just blond hair and a few snatches of remembered conversation. She was gone, utterly gone, but his love for her remained; an ache that had outlived her.

  He was gone too – the ambitious scholar, the hopeful husband, even the father to the child she had left him. He’d sent the girl away, hoping she would grow up free of the attention of the gods that had cursed him and her mother.

  ‘Is it you?’

  A woman’s voice but none he had ever heard.

  ‘It is you. I know you by this stone. It is you. Wake up and free me.’

  ‘Hey!’ Gylfa was on his feet, his sword drawn. Then he was sitting down, his sword somewhere else.

  Loys jumped from sleep, his hand on the wolfstone. In front of him was an extraordinary figure, squat, bulky, wrapped in two large coats and giving the impression of being wider than it was tall. Its face was thin, though, a great squashed turnip of a nose poking out from a scarf. Its left hand seemed enormous, a huge black glove on it. Its right was a normal size and had only a stained yellow glove in addition to the sword.

  It steamed at the mouth like a monster out of myth. If Loys ever met a troll, he thought, it would look like this lopsided barrel of a creature, though he saw he had no reason to draw his sword. The figure had surprised them, the wolfstone damping down Loys’s senses. If he had wanted to kill them it would have been the easiest thing in the world. He?

  ‘You are the wolf. Is it you who has been calling to me?’

  Her voice was incongruous, melodious, feminine. No man spoke like that, not even the eunuchs of Constantinople.

  ‘You’re a woman,’ said Gylfa.

  ‘Are you him?’ She ignored the boy.

  ‘I can’t be bested by a woman,’ said Gylfa. He half crawled, half ran for his sword.

  The woman seemed unconcerned. Loys noted the blue sheen on her blade. Damascan steel. A sword like that cost fortunes and would only be bought by a professional warrior. It was an investment, a bet that it could make you more money than the price of the farm it would take to pay for it.

 
; ‘Leave her,’ said Loys.

  ‘She means to kill us.’ Gylfa pointed his sword at the woman. He looked more like he was offering it for her to take. How did a Viking, raised to war, finish up with so little skill at arms?

  ‘I’d say not. Who are you, lady?’

  ‘Freydis of the Varangian Guard.’

  ‘Is she a shield maiden?’ said Gylfa. ‘I’ve heard of them but I’d imagined them a sight better looking!’

  ‘I could make you call me beautiful,’ said Freydis.

  ‘Not while I still have eyes.’ Gylfa danced back and forth, pulled forward by the string of his manliness, pulled back by that of his cowardice.

  ‘Well, tearing them out might be one way to go about it,’ said Freydis, ‘but, looking at you, I’d guess I’d only have to show you the sharp edge of my sword to have you declare me the light of all the north.’

  ‘I won’t kneel to a woman.’

  ‘You will if I cut you off at the knees.’

  Loys held up his hand. ‘Gylfa. Put down your sword. We have enough enemies in this land without searching for more.’

  The boy took a pace back. All he had needed was an excuse to dodge the fight and Loys had provided him with one.

  ‘I was of Constantinople,’ said Loys.

  ‘I’ve heard of you.’

  ‘From whom? You have been with her?’

  He didn’t need to say who he meant. No one else knew his secret, only Styliane.

  ‘Yes. I am her servant.’

  ‘Have you followed me? She can’t want me dead.’

  Gylfa wafted his sword about, as if trying to bat away a fly. ‘She’s not going to kill you, is she? I’d like to see her try.’

  ‘She sent you here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are not here by coincidence. There is a world for us to be in. Why do we share this spot?’

  ‘I came here to get away from her. I only followed you since I heard you call.’

  He looked around to the cold hills, floating like their own ghosts above the fog.

  ‘I haven’t spoken, lady.’

  ‘I heard the voice of the wolf.’

  ‘Not my voice. How did you hear it?’

  ‘In my mind. I have a curse upon me. I think you can cure it. There is a rune in my heart and you frighten it away.’

  ‘Now? Is the rune afraid now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And why do you want it to go? A rune is a great gift.’

  ‘It brings a destiny. The runes want to be together. My lady has four. I have one. My rune wants her runes for company, she told me as much on the Galata bridge. If I am near her when I die then the rune will go to her and she will be nearer to resurrecting the god; nearer madness.’

  ‘If you kill her then the runes will go to you. You could be a queen.’

  ‘Or a madwoman. I do not want to kill Styliane.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I love her. I served her by her side and now I serve her by keeping away. She has lived a long time and I would have been happy to grow old in her company. Now I must live, at all costs.’

  Loys put his hand to the wolfstone. Freydis would not be there by accident. A shattered story was playing out, repeating, stammering, falling to nonsense. If she bore a rune she was part of it, sent by the will of a god now dead, Odin – the world sorcerer – so powerful that his desires lived on after his death. He thought he should kill her. But if he did, then where would her rune go? To Styliane, maybe, who would be one step nearer the divine. Could Odin take flesh on earth, even if he was dead in the realm of the gods? Loys didn’t know.

  ‘You are a famous killer, I think,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then perhaps that’s why you’re here. I am trying to die.’

  ‘You are the wolf, you cannot die, Styliane told me.’

  ‘I think I can, in some senses. But if I do die then the story begins again, with me as an unknowing participant. I want to die properly. Will you help me?’

  ‘I am a mercenary. What is my fee?’

  ‘When I find who I am looking for, I will take her to the world well as it appears in London. There we will ask it for guidance. I will ask how you might be rid of your rune and the destiny it brings. Though I tell you clearly, I do not know if I will be answered. The well asks a high price for its knowledge and I have nothing to give, no lover to lose, no kin or friend.’

  ‘Odin gave an eye at Mimir’s well and he hung on the tree for nine days,’ said Freydis.

  ‘He was a god. Lesser beings are asked for more.’

  ‘Would you give an eye?’

  ‘Whatever is asked,’ said Loys. ‘All I ask is your protection.’

  ‘How should I protect you?’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘There is a girl. I have tracked her here. I’ll know her when I see her. She is my killer. You must protect her until the murder rune inside her can grow and prosper.’

  ‘You are a mighty man and need no help from a woman. Protect her from who?’ said Gylfa.

  Loys said nothing.

  ‘And you will ask at the well?’ said Freydis.

  ‘I swear it.’

  ‘Then I swear too.’

  ‘She’s not coming with us, is she?’ said Gylfa.

  ‘She’s coming with me,’ said Loys. ‘Whether she comes with us depends on whether you choose to follow. Now saddle your horse and keep it away from me.’

  ‘You’re afraid of horses?’ said Freydis.

  ‘No,’ said Loys. ‘They’re afraid of me.’

  They slept pressed against each other and awoke to a murky dawn. The cold was numbing, mind altering, clouding his thoughts with ice. Loys pressed his nose into the horse’s flank, taking just a little warmth and comfort before the journey. When Gylfa and Freydis were ready, he took off the stone and walked behind his horse, Freydis well ahead. The animal had worked hard all the day before and he knew that, if they flogged it for another day, it might go lame, which would leave Gylfa having to walk. Besides, the boy was happier when the horse went slower.

  The hills and the passes were dusted with frost, though the wind still did not blow, which was a mercy.

  They rounded the shoulder of a hill and looked out as if over a sea – the fog obscuring all the land below therm.

  There were human tracks in the grass. Loys sniffed at them. Four or five men, one woman, all moving in fear. He could taste it in all its heart-thumping, sweat-stained exhilaration. These people thought they were on the edge of death and Loys, his wolf mind chewing at the edges of his human thoughts, felt his mouth grow wet.

  Loys heard the wolf rune cry out – its howl a shiver made sound.

  Noises drifted up from the valley – voices raised. At that distance it was impossible to tell if they were crying out in exultation or anger. A sound like the fall of a great load of something. Loys recognised that – men charging into battle. Gylfa did too.

  ‘What is that?’

  Loys sniffed the air.

  ‘Hard to say. War, in one of its various forms.’

  ‘And we’re going towards it?’

  ‘I am,’ said Loys. ‘You must do as you please.’

  ‘Master!’ Gylfa fell to his knees in front of Loys. ‘Let us go away from this land! Let us be great pirates somewhere. A man of your fighting prestige would find it easy to raise a crew and I know all the most profitable shores. Ireland still has its treasures, the east too. Think what we could take. Kings would envy our gold. This woman could join us if you so please.’

  ‘We’re going down there.’

  ‘To death?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Loys. ‘I have taken you as far as I can, Gylfa. Now it’s up to you what you do. Come with me if you want.Or go on. The fog
is your friend. You can see where the sun comes up and where it sets, so head south. The lands there are not under such a heavy burden of war and you may find employment.’

  ‘I fear to go on alone!’

  ‘Then stay by my side.’

  Gylfa crossed himself. ‘I will die down there.’

  ‘And if you stay up here you will die. For most men death does not submit to choice in the question of its occurrence, only in that of its timing.’

  ‘You talk too well for me, sir.’

  ‘It is a sign of nobility,’ said Freydis.

  A howl echoed from the valley below, an ancient sound, full of loneliness, agony and exultation. Loys’s muscles writhed on his bones in response to it. The rune called him, she was down there. He ran down the hillside into the fog and Gylfa scrambled to mount the horse.

  Loys followed her scent on the damp grass. The trail was fresh and clear. She was near. His lover, his killer, and she was in danger. She could not die; she had to survive to help him thwart fate.

  17 Discovered

  They passed across the plain hardly breathing lest they disturb any plunderers still at their work. Villages appeared as ghosts of themselves, insubstantial, broken in. They were there for a second before the mist claimed them and made Tola wonder if she had seen them at all.

  At first Tola thought the mounds were the markers for farming laines but they were too close set, too numerous. The frost gave an explanation. It had broken up the shallow earth all along a low-lying hollow and a grave had split like a hideous pie. The man inside it had been dead a little while. She glanced at him but looked away, having seen enough of destruction.

  The bandits, however, fell upon him, searching for valuable clothes or for rings. There were none and they cursed him for being such a stingy, nasty corpse.

  ‘That man is a Norman,’ said Rannvér.

  ‘His hair betrays him,’ said Agni.

  They went on as if over a frozen sea, so many were the undulations. Waves of dead. Tola was sure of one thing.

  ‘They’re all Normans,’ she said.

  ‘I’d say King Sveinn has got busy here,’ said Agni.

  ‘Who is that?’ said Tola.

  ‘Our ferryman. He brought us over from Denmark, or rather his men did. England’s in too bad a state for any true Viking man to ignore. His army may have been bound here. I don’t think even they knew where they were going when they landed. Perhaps there will be no Normans in York.’